Top 150 Cyril Connolly Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”

— Cyril Connolly

2. “While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”

— Cyril Connolly

3. “The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.”

— Cyril Connolly

4. “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.”

— Cyril Connolly

5. “When in doubt, choose greatness.”

— Cyril Connolly

6. “We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.”

— Cyril Connolly

7. “Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.”

— Cyril Connolly

8. “There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.”

— Cyril Connolly

9. “Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.”

— Cyril Connolly

10. “No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.”

— Cyril Connolly

11. “In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?”

— Cyril Connolly

12. “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”

— Cyril Connolly

13. “Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.”

— Cyril Connolly

14. “The books I haven’t written are better than the books other people have.”

— Cyril Connolly

15. “Friendships that last are those wherein each friend respects the other’s dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from them.”

— Cyril Connolly

16. “The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, – luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, – are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.”

— Cyril Connolly

17. “We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.”

— Cyril Connolly

18. “Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.”

— Cyril Connolly

19. “The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.”

— Cyril Connolly

20. “No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.”

— Cyril Connolly

21. “Sheep with a nasty side.”

— Cyril Connolly

22. “A woman’s desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.”

— Cyril Connolly

23. “Youth is a period of missed opportunities.”

— Cyril Connolly

24. “Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.”

— Cyril Connolly

25. “Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.”

— Cyril Connolly

26. “No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.”

— Cyril Connolly

27. “The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.”

— Cyril Connolly

28. “A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.”

— Cyril Connolly

29. “If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.”

— Cyril Connolly

30. “It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.”

— Cyril Connolly

31. “No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.”

— Cyril Connolly

32. “The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.”

— Cyril Connolly

33. “In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.”

— Cyril Connolly

34. “Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.”

— Cyril Connolly

35. “The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.”

— Cyril Connolly

36. “There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.”

— Cyril Connolly

Featured in: Strong Quotes

37. “Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.”

— Cyril Connolly

38. “The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.”

— Cyril Connolly

39. “Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.”

— Cyril Connolly

40. “The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.”

— Cyril Connolly

41. “Hate is crystallized fear, fear’s dividend, fear objectified. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.”

— Cyril Connolly

42. “Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.”

— Cyril Connolly

43. “There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.”

— Cyril Connolly

44. “Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.”

— Cyril Connolly

45. “Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.”

— Cyril Connolly

46. “Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.”

— Cyril Connolly

47. “Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.”

— Cyril Connolly

48. “Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.”

— Cyril Connolly

49. “Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.”

— Cyril Connolly

50. “We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.”

— Cyril Connolly